Postcard From Ailing British Coasts: Wish You Were Here

The town of Morecambe, England, was once a popular vacation spot, but many younger Britons now head to Spain.Credit
Jonathan Player for The New York Times

MORECAMBE, England — There would be risqué postcards depicting large ladies and men in checked flat caps telling rude jokes. There would be rides on the beach on baleful donkeys, and tooth-jarring, solid-sugar candy called rock.

Across Britain, from Blackpool to Brighton, the seaside occupied a special place in the heart and mythology of industrial Britain, a place where you parked a Ford or an Austin near flat beaches, built castles from soggy, brown sand and sat on striped deck chairs until the rain came.

But that vision of Britain at rest has long faded. Affluence, low-cost flights and the simple facts of geography — Spain is warmer and drier than Britain, for instance — have changed the whole notion of vacation for new generations of Britons unlikely to be lured by a game of bingo on a windy promenade or the landladies of boarding houses offering lumpy beds and greasy breakfasts.

Indeed, much as rose-tinted retrospection might suggest otherwise, this tradition offered great inconvenience and not much luxury — sand in the sandwiches, milky tea in the thermos, weary children in the back seat of the Ford or Austin. Gastronomy scaled no greater heights than cod in batter and thick-cut fries — fish and chips — or bags of cockles, a rubbery mollusk, marinated in malt vinegar.

So, is it so surprising that, like the tides receding across the flat vistas of the North or Irish Seas, the decline of Britain’s onetime beach resorts should leave not just a certain elegiac melancholy, but also a growing concern about what happens to places like Morecambe or Blackpool or Scarborough when those large ladies and men in flat caps turn south for Benidorm, Spain, or Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands. The onetime British refrain, “I do like to be beside the seaside,” has long been supplanted by “Viva España,” or Florida or Gambia.

“Coastal towns account for a disproportionately high proportion of England’s deprived areas,” said a recent report by a panel of parliamentary legislators in London that listed a grim tally of disadvantage: “their physical isolation, the inward migration of older people, the high levels of transience, the outward migration of young people, poor quality housing and the nature of the coastal economy.”

“Their economic regeneration is of critical importance,” said the report, published in March.

But the debate on reviving such resorts has, in fact, played into another, more tangled, discussion over a nation divided between those who struggle to get by and those who get by with ease. “Splendor and squalor exist side by side,” said Geraldine Smith, a local member of Parliament from Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Labor Party.

In the outlying neighborhoods here, for instance, there are prosperous homes whose value rises almost at London rates. A genteel affluence slides through the golf club and leafy lanes. Yet, in pockets of poverty there are migrant Polish workers crammed alongside people on welfare in low-cost housing once used as vacationers’ boardinghouses and hotels.

Some guesthouses have become retirement homes for older people reliant on state health care. Young people leave for opportunities elsewhere, driven away by what the report called a “dual economy, with high house prices alongside a large, low-quality private rental sector.”

Photo

The towns favorite-son comedian, Eric Morecambe: now long gone, honored in bronze.Credit
Jonathan Player for The New York Times

The town’s most famous son, the comedian John Eric Bartholomew (1926-1984), left home several decades ago to make his name elsewhere under the stage name Eric Morecambe of the duo Morecambe and Wise. His statue now adorns the promenade.

In this northwestern town with its vistas of the Lake District hills across the treacherous shallows of Morecambe (pronounced MORE-cam) Bay, the number of people arriving for a short spell and moving on means that it is “not uncommon for primary schools to experience 30 to 40 percent turnover of pupils in a single year,” according to the local council.

Just to the south, in Blackpool — the iconic blue-collar resort of northern England since Victorian times — “only inner London has higher levels of transience,” Blackpool’s local authority said in a recent study.

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That is hardly surprising in places where jobs depend on the seasons and economies struggle to draw back visitors lost to foreign competition. In Blackpool, for instance, the annual number of visitors has fallen to 10 million from 17 million in the past 15 years.

And if there is one emblem here of a transient population falling victim to cruel times, it was the episode in 2004 when 23 Chinese migrants died in Morecambe Bay, caught in the capricious tides as they picked cockles on behalf of distant gang masters.

“What we get is an imbalance of people coming in with a host of problems,” said Ms. Smith, the legislator.

There is another discussion about how to revive places that, by definition, are at the end of the road — or, as the British parliamentary report put it, “One obvious feature of all coastal towns is that they are next to the sea.”

In Blackpool, the town elders pinned their hopes on the construction of a “super casino” in the manner of Las Vegas to stanch the decline. But the government in London determined that this vast temple to gambling should be built in a deprived area of Manchester. Then in March, that plan was blocked in Parliament by an odd coalition of opponents in the House of Lords and the House of Commons, and Blackpool’s hopes have risen again.

But there are still many who oppose the idea that gambling can help regenerate the economies of rundown areas. Indeed, some say they believe the main effect of casinos is to create gamblers. “All addictions are imprisonments for the soul,” said the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, in the discussion of Britain’s super casino.

Such considerations, perhaps, seemed remote as this tired resort prepared for the Easter holidays. A Ferris wheel stood still. The amusement arcades awaited their clients. A fish and chip shop did desultory business. But the sun shone on a beach created from 37,000 tons of imported pale sand. Children gamboled, and adults rolled up their pants legs to test the waters.

There were no donkeys, but two women rode their horses along the high-tide line. Across the bay, the Lake District hills with names like the Old Man of Coniston and Dow Crag etched their profiles on a hazy horizon. “Morecambe can be very beautiful on a sunny day,” Ms. Smith said, almost wistfully.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Postcard From Ailing British Coasts: Wish You Were Here. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe